Category Archives: Roman Catholicism

Liturgy Trap: Angelic Celibacy

Here is the key question:  should we place Mary in the context of her Hebrew background (see Judges 11:37-40) or in the thought patters of St Jerome?  The strongest argument that Mary had sexual relations with Joseph after Jesus’s birth is the text itself.   I know of the backbending anchorites engage in to make the text say the opposite of what it says.  It simply doesn’t work.

In the bible perpetual virginity is a tragedy (47).

The strongest argument for perpetual virginity is that Joseph would have been overawed by Mary’s high calling in giving birth to God himself that he wouldn’t have “polluted” her womb with dirty sex afterwards (Peter Gillquist, Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith, Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1989, 118).    Here are the problems with such a view:

  1. Even if correct, it is pure speculation.
  2. If one partner refused sex to the other, he/she would have grounds to divorce the other (Exodus 21:10-11).
  3. Neither Mary nor Joseph knew that Jesus was God incarnate until after his resurrection.  They would have known he was called, perhaps even Messiah, but that didn’t mean Logos Incarnate (51).

Angelic Celibacy

Roman Catholicism is guiltier of this than Orthodoxy, though both share the same unbiblical presuppositions.  If we may reason analogically, the High Priest is sort of an analogue to the Bishop today.  Yet the High Priest could marry.  Why may not the Bishop?

Secondly, God has said that celibacy is “not good.”   The entire scale of being ontology falls with those two words.

Liturgy Trap: Two Stage Christianity

Jordan’s specific target in this chapter is the rite of confirmation.  I want to expand the sights.   If you are in the “Really True Church” and I am not, yet you are kind enough to consider me a “Christian,” then the only conclusion one can draw is that I am a second-class Christian.  Yet the New Testament knows nothing of this.  Jesus gives his Spirit as an arrabon to his people.  Full Stop.

Two-Stage Christianity is simply an advanced form of gnosticism.

Apostolic Succession

A true apostolic succession is the royal priesthood which is succession through baptism.

If we want to wax Trinitarian, then the Church is a creation of the Spirit from eternity by procession, not succession (46).

Liturgy Trap: Veneration

The Second Commandment

There is no problem with the actual act of bowing.  The problem is “to what do we people in the context of worship and liturgy?”  The second commandment is very clear that we are never to bow in giving veneration toward man-made objects (24).

The second commandment isn’t saying there should be no pictures of God (a point for another day), but that no image of anything can be set up as an avenue of worship to God and the court of heaven (24).

Only one pesel

Pesel is the Hebrew word for “carving.”  Jordan neatly takes the argument a step forward by pointing out that “there is another pesel in the Book of Exodus:  The Ten Words, which God carved with his own finger” (26).  “The opposition is between God’s content-filled graven Words and man’s silent graven images.”

God’s pesel is how he relates to us.  The relationship is verbal.  It is personal.  “It is God-initiated.”  Jordan comments, “When men set up a pesel it is always man-initiated” (27).  “The ‘veneration’ of man’s pesel is not a conversation with God, but prostration before a man-made object.”  This is the one objection even the most articulate anchorite cannot answer: is conversation–words–possible?

Anchorites love to counter that “Well, God commanded Israel to make various carvings.”  So he did. We say, however, “what is prohibited is the creation of a contact-point with God in the likeness of other creatures” (28).

Jordan makes an interesting observation:  nowhere in the Hebrew scriptures do we see God’s people condemned for making a picture of God.  Rather, they make up images of God and use them as mediators (29).

Application

“God initiates the mediation between himself and us, and He controls it” (29).  “God’s mediation is verbal…God’s mediation is his pesel, the Word.  Manmade mediators are images.”

Jordan concludes the chapter with a reflection on God’s 4th generation curse on image-worshipers.

Liturgical Trap: What is the Trap?

Jordan defines the “Liturgy Trap” as seeing worship as a technique for evangelism (xiv).  Whatever else our liturgy may be, it must always be a response to the Word of God.  Said another way: The Word of God comes first.  The rest of the introduction explains why evangelicals would be tempted to high church traditions.  Since that’s is fairly well-documented by theologians and sociologists (Christian Smith et al), I won’t belabor the point.

The Saints

Should we venerate the saints?  We should at least ask, “What does the Bible say?”  Critics might respond, “Yeah, well the Bible doesn’t say anything about the term T rinity, either” (this is a specific quote from Orthodox Bridge).  True, but assuming the Bible to be part of tradition (which I don’t assume), shouldn’t we at least pretend it is the most important part?

Jordan first notes there is no biblical warrant to pray to saints (18).  Since the disciples asked Jesus specifically how to pray, and he gave them a specific template, it is telling that venerating saints is absent.  Jordan then gives the standard biblical arguments against necromancy,  pointing out that Saul was condemned for talking to the dead Samuel.

Interestingly, had the early Christians talked to dead people, the Jews and Judaizers would have had a field day condemning them, yet we don’t see that.

Jordan writes,

The notion that the saints can hear our petitions means that a given saint can hear thousands of petitions coming from people all over the world.  This means that the saint has become virtually omnipresent.  What happens when that saint gets his resurrection body and is once again limited to being in one place at one time? (21)

Of course, and my critics hate to hear this, but this is a movement back towards chain of being and Hellenistic philosophy.

I can be open minded

I can listen to people on some topics while disagreeing firmly with them on others.   I came out strong against John Macarthur’s strange fire conference.  Not that I am a charismatic, but I just found the arguments weak.   Still, that is not to denigrate the good work he has done, and I really hope his sloppy arguments there do not backfire and tarnish an otherwise fine ministry.

Here are his talks on Catholicism, which should be interesting.

Are you using the right incense?

I have one more post in my series on High Southern Culture.  I plan to address the historiography of the so-called “Confederates in the Pulpit.”   A minor detour for the moment.  The closest any high church tradition can get in the bible’s commanding our use of incense is in Malachi 1:11

For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name will be[b] great among the nations, and in every place incense will be offered to my name, and a pure offering.

Granted this isn’t actually a command but it seems that God sees their use of incense in the coming generations.  Several difficulties come to mind:

  1. To be consistent with the text, are you also offering “the pure offering?”   If you spiritualize that part of the text, why is the Protestant wrong in spiritualizing the incense part?
  2. Are you using the proper formula set forth in Exodus 30:9 (You shall not offer unauthorized incense on it)?
  3. If you are not offering the 1:1 formula, you are literally playing with fire, since the “non-judge-non-wrathful-God not-killed” Nadab and Abihu for offering unauthorized incense.
  4. If you are using the 1:1 formula, then one has to ask why we as New Covenant Christians have to go back to the types and shadows which the Book of Hebrews put a stop to?

Mary(ied) Relations with Joseph

I’m reading some old biblical typology discussions on whether Mary and Joseph ever consummated their relationship after Jesus’s birth.   I used to always think this was a no-brainer  When I read all the church fathers it seemed to seep into me that maybe they didn’t.  I’ve rejected that view, too.  I am going to look at the evidence.

1.  The text clearly says that Joseph did not know Mary until after she purified herself from childbirth.  I know of all the Anchorite hoops jumped through on this verse, but the most natural meaning of the text is that they eventually consummated their relationship.

2.   Mary was a good Jewish girl.  Hebrew girls wanted to give away their virginity to their husbands.

3.   Deliberate refusal of sex for “spiritual” reasons in marriage is simply docetism.

4.  Marriage is a reflection of Christ and his church.  What would an unconsummated marriage teach about Christ and the church?

 

Jesus, Firmament, and Prayers to Saints

Jesus = Firmament.   This is so because he is the only mediator between heaven and earth.

Earth (us)  ———————- Firmament (Jesus-Mediator) ————————— (heaven) departed saints.

You can’t talk to dead saints because Jesus is in the way.

The firmament, and this needs some fleshing out from the Hebrew, is the boundary between heaven and earth (understanding, of course, that the Bible uses heaven in a multiplex sense).  Jesus becomes the New Firmament. The Firmament in Genesis 1 is not simply the boundary between earth and sky, or earth and waters, but also the boundary between the waters above (which is the sea before God’s throne) and the waters below (which have yet to be gathered into seas).    The Firmament in this sense is “above” us.

While speculative, this makes infinitely more sense of the hilasterion passages of the NT.    Liberals and Eastern Orthodox hate the word propitiation because it suggests God gets mad.   Conservatives are on stronger lexical ground.   I think propitiation is a good translation of Romans 3:25.   It becomes problematic, though, when we move to 1 John 2, where it says Jesus is the propitiation for the whole world.   This comes very close to universal atonement.

Most good commentaries will say that hilasterion is (correctly) referring to the Mercy Seat above the ark.   If so, then Jesus is the new mercy seat who takes to himself God’s great fireball to destroy evil.   He is the Protective Covering between heaven and earth.   This way hilasterion means nothing about universal atonement.

John Barach has an interesting take on this.

(2) Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters (Gen. 1:6) & You shall not make for yourself a carved image … you shall not bow down to them nor serve them (Ex. 20:4-6).

The firmament is between the waters above and the waters below.  The firmament includes everything we call “outer space,” since the sun, moon, and stars will be placed in the firmament on Day 4.  The waters above the firmament reappear later in Scripture as the sea below God’s throne (e.g., Rev. 4:6).  Thus the firmament is the barrier and the mediator between heaven and earth.  It’s a veil, corresponding to the veil in the tabernacle.  The tearing of that veil represents the rending of the mediator (Heb. 10:20).

The second commandment has to do with bowing to images in order to worship Yahweh through them.  The images are false mediators.  So both the second word in Genesis 1 and the second word in Exodus 20 have to do with mediation.